One of the most remarkable success stories of recent times is the rapid growth and widespread acceptance of the Internet-based World Wide Web (hereinafter the “Web”). The Web provides both the normal individual and the professional information seeker access to a wealth of information on almost every subject under the sun of both casual and professional interest. Simply by entering keywords into a web browser that works in concert with a web site, an information seeker can search a vast amount of the content on the web, and thereby locate any web pages that match the seeker's query. Unfortunately however, due to the abundance of information that is accessible through the web, information seekers may find that they actually obtain too much information, in fact much more information than they are able to review. For example, an Internet search for the keyword “automobile” using the Google® Internet search engine returned an overwhelming fifty-three million eight hundred thousand related web sites. Even with this vast resource at their disposal, it is doubtful that any person could examine that many web pages.
One method that has been developed to overcome this obstacle involves ranking the web pages based upon criteria. As such, in order to make the results of a search tractable, the browser's presentation of the search results may be limited to a relatively small number of web pages, even though the search engine may have found a larger number of relevant web pages. Furthermore, the pages that are presented are often ranked according to their relevancy to the search using rules that are known and/or defined by the search engine but are often unknown by the searcher. Unfortunately, this method is insufficient because the task of operating the Internet browser is up to the user, meaning that the user must still manually submit queries to one or more sites. Thus, the user has to start the internet browser program and then input a web address (URL) into the location field in order to tell the browser to navigate to a specific site before they can input their query. The user must then repeat this process for every site the user would like to submit a query. Because of these limitations, the typical searcher is unable to gain the full benefit of the wealth of information that is potentially available through the Internet.
Another problem for Internet web ‘surfers’ involves the time it takes to navigate through web pages. For example, if a user is seeking to obtain information from a particular web site the user has to open a browser, navigate to that web site's home page, provide selection criteria related to a desired query and click on a submission button. In response, a web page containing the information (or links to the information) the user seeks is displayed. This can be a time consuming process especially if the user has to look for multiple pieces of information on several different web sites. Consider the situation where an individual frequently shops on line. When that individual determines that they would like to buy a product, they must open a browser, navigate to an online store and provide selection criteria related to the product they are seeking. As above, if the individual wants to shop for several items or perform comparison shopping for the best prices, they must perform this task as many times as necessary until the individual has obtained all of the items they desired and/or until they are satisfied that they obtained the best price. This can be a very time consuming and frustrating task.